Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 539 posts

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#131

Post by smileybarry »

I used to like JIRA, back when it was only issues/tickets. It was essentially a nice, organized database for humans that you could sift through with precise filters & searches. Bug applies here, workflow describes where handling it is in the pipeline, issue types meant you could filter by "what is this", etc.

I loved using "basic" JIRA, mentioning issue IDs in places to clearly reference a web of "why this bit of code is the way it is", so someone digging into source code can self-answer stuff like "why not do X". (e.g.: because it caused a bug for Y)

Now there's stories, and boards, and sprints, and agile, and the worst part is that they all interact like crap. Why do "tasks" and "stories" exist? Why not the old: New Feature, Bug, Improvement? At least with those you could always see at a glance what that issue is.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#132

Post by throwaway787544 »

I don't. I use it every day and rarely ever have an issue. It's well integrated with Confluence. There's even some decent CLI tools now (still young but have promise) that mean we could automate away the interface.

All the reviews I see on that site seem to be upset that it might require training, or that their project's admins have made it a nightmare. It's not a nightmare out of the box.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#133

Post by alephxyz »

akamaka wrote: post #75

I’m starting to wonder if one of the best features of Jira is that it directs all of the developer hatred away from management and toward the task-management software. I’ve worked on projects that used Jira very effectively, so I’m convinced that all of the complainers actually not fully aware of how bad their managers are.

JIRA configs are usually the visible manifestation of your organisation's processes. It's Conway's law applied to task management workflows.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#134

Post by Nextgrid »

What I really hate is not Jira itself, it's the company behind it and its engineering practices. Their mediocrity goes beyond Jira.

They've had server-side-rendered features that while slow, contained the slowness to the backend and bundled it into one single slow request - once you waited for that, you had a fully-working page in your browser. Since it was all on the backend, your browser remained responsive while waiting.

Nowadays however there's no longer a single operation to wait for - they've split their pile of shit and offloaded it to your browser. You have to wait for the backend which is slow, but then you also have to wait for megabytes of JS to load & execute in your browser, all while the page moves around and your CPU is pegged at 100%. And God help you if you click on something by accident, as "undoing" that means waiting for another load. To add insult to injury, everything is clickable and triggers some actions, even elements that represent content and that you wouldn't normally expect to be clickable (nor would want to - let's say you wanted to copy the text).

Recently they've added another annoyance - in Bitbucket they've done some changes with regards to diff rendering and obviously have to let you know. They do so via a persistent floating popover in the bottom-left of the screen that you have to manually dismiss and the dismissal status seems to be contained to the browser - if you switch browsers or use private mode you have to deal with it continuously.

My experience with Atlassian products has actually deteriorated despite CPU speeds, browser performance & network connections improving. I used to have a mostly positive opinion of the company 5 years ago but that's no longer the case.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#135

Post by polotics »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next. I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now). The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for…

Does Linus use JIRA on that little project called the Linux kernel? Why is git with good readmes and clear pull requests not enough project management? If you're not doing PR's you are just LARPing software development. I don't hate JIRA, I hate "IT" employees that can't program.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#136

Post by t43562 »

It appeals to companies that think they only have to pay for one tool. It's awful for agile work but your boss sees the "agile" tickbox and says "fine"

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#137

Post by jbluepolarbear »

tommoor wrote: post #57
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tool for the boring part of software engineering- I don't expect it to spark joy. I wish it were faster, scaled the full width of my monitor, allowed external editors, etc. Overall it gets the job done well. Everything else that I've used is horrible which makes it the best in my experience but that's still not saying much.

But what if it _did_ spark joy… https://linear.app/readme

I use linear and I hate it more than jira. It’s jira with all the useful production features removed, making it useless for large teams and qa teams. Beyond simple task tracking it has been a chore to use.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#138

Post by lamontcg »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next. I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now). The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for…

> I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve.

I think the problem is that Jira is optimized for productivity theater and top-down management.

When an organization deploys Jira it is usually because upper management thinks that it needs a deluge of task tracking so that everyone can stay perfectly "aligned" all the time.

This creates an annoying amount of make-work on the part of Engineers and their immediate managers, slows down velocity and the vast majority of the time spent on inputting data into Jira never results in anything actionable.

Jira is just a symptom of the disease though.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#139

Post by kerblang »

In my experience, Jira is the dog that begins to resemble its owner. If you are working in a toxic, dysfunctional organization, Jira will reflect that:

- Giant forms with dozens upon dozens of nonsensical fields (preferably with abbreviations as names, like "IFE App.") half of which are required so you just stuff random words in them to make it shut up

- Thousands of tickets that would probably take 30+ software devs 100+ years to implement

- Can't find your project because your project's name is nonsense (also preferably with abbreviations)

- Task descriptions have hundreds of words of nonsensical boilerplate but don't actually say anything at all

- 50 different ways each to say "Finished", "Started" or "Abandoned"

- Workflow state transitions reminiscient of the outdoor maze in The Shining (crazy man with axe optional)

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#140

Post by dboreham »

I've probably said this before here but I just don't see what was wrong with Bugzilla. We spent years getting it honed to suit a good bug lifecycle model. Everything since has been fubar one way or another.
Post reply on HN